Barack Obama's education secretary has made a striking endorsement of coalition plans to reform schools, outlining areas of shared vision on improving the chances of the poorest pupils and removing failing teachers.

Arne Duncan, who visits Britain next week, praised the UK government's leadership on raising standards in schools and welcomed the pupil premium as an honest attempt to tackle poverty.

In an interview with the Guardian, Duncan backed a vision of highly individual state-funded schools, including ones that might cater specifically for gay teenagers who are victims of homophobic bullying in mainstream schools.

Duncan will meet the education secretary Michael Gove and tour a London school on Wednesday. The coalition's controversial free schools are inspired by the US charter schools movement, which often demand longer hours from teachers and impose strict discipline on children.

He said: "I just have tremendous respect for the educational work and the leadership that I've seen coming from the UK and we're all working on the same issues and have the same challenges."

The talks with Gove will focus on how to "elevate" the teaching profession, bringing in committed new teachers while ensuring bad ones are eliminated. Both Obama and Duncan have taken a tough line on failing teachers, praising education officials who fired all the staff at a school in Rhode Island in February after they refused to work a longer day.

Gove and Duncan are also expected to look at how best to evaluate teachers' performance, and how to reach "historically under-served" communities.

Duncan has a bigger budget than any previous education secretary, but has made states compete for federal cash by favouring those that are most ambitious in reforming their schools, under the Race to the Top initiative. New York got nearly $700m (£437m) after adopting a new system for evaluating teachers that took students' test performances into account.

Duncan said: "I can't speak for the UK, but I will tell you, in the United States, teacher evaluation is just fundamentally broken and over 90% of teachers receive an exceptional rating in our country." This was demeaning to teachers, he said, failing to reward good teaching or to remove those were failing. "The systems aren't working for any of the adults – I promise you it's not working for the children. It's part of the problem."

He backed a vision of "free schools" which are funded by the taxpayer but able to adopt their own teaching methods and vary the curriculum. Duncan accused critics who said these schools would flourish at the expense of existing state schools of indulging in "phoney debates".

"There are lots of different ways to get at equality of education but just perpetuating a status quo that's broken is not going to help children, not going to change their families' future, and does a grave disservice to our country," he said.

"These are all public schools, these are all our children, these are our dollars and they're all accountable to us."

Asked whether the coalition's pupil premium, where money follows individual children, was preferable to an area-wide strategy for tackling poverty, he said: "I don't think its either/or, those both intersect and relate.

"There's no one right answer but having the UK take this issue on honestly and try some things I think is really important, and you learn over time what's working, what's not."

Amid concern about suicides among gay teenagers in the US, Duncan says schools that fail to protect pupils from bullying could have public funding cut. The diversity of new schools could include some which focus on being a haven for pupils victimised because of their sexuality.

"If you're being scared all the time, bullied you can't begin to do your best academically, its impossible," he said.

"I think we need a variety of different types of school that [offer] different choices for children, whether it's schools that focus on high performing arts, schools that focus on the international baccalaureate, or schools that have a tremendous focus on tolerance, diversity and respect.

"I think one-size-fits-all is part of what hasn't worked in education, frankly. The more we can create a series of great choices, the better, and let students figure out what the best one for them is."

Obama is concerned that the US has one of the worst high-school drop-out rates in the world, and trails behind other countries when it comes to the share of the population who go to university. Britain has also fallen sharply, from having the third highest graduation rate in 2000 to 15th place in 2008, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Referring to the US, Duncan said: "That's not acceptable. We have to educate our way to a better economy, so the president said by 2020 we have to again lead the world in college graduates, so that's the north star of all of our work."

Ultimately, he expects that every American child will go on to some form of higher education, ranging from a four-year degree to two years at a community college or some form of vocational training.

"In a massively competitive knowledge-based economy, there are basically no good jobs out there for high school dropouts and there are virtually no good jobs out there if you just have a high-school diploma, so some form of higher skilled education has to be the goal for every single child in this country."

He added: "I can't give you a date we'll reach that 100% goal, but that is absolutely the goal."

Role models

US

Charter schools educate more than a million children in the US. They are government-funded but independent. Research at Stanford University found that more than a third had worse results than traditional schools.

Canada

Headteachers set the ethos and control the budget at Alberta's charter schools. Calgary Girls' school has a special focus on women in history. The Suzuki school in Edmonton includes music teaching based on the Suzuki method.

Sweden

About 10% of schools in Sweden are state-funded but independent. An Institute of Education study found children from highly educated families benefited more than the poorest.